Collection

Painter, creator of installations and videos. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. She creates images inspired by remembrance and imagination, combining autobiographical stories with dream poetics. She has used identical motifs in installation and film. The artist’s works often revisit the times of her childhood and growing up in socialist Poland, becoming an analysis of private and family life. Invited to collaborate by Mirosław Bałka, she participated in the Absolute Generations show accompanying the 50^th Venice Art Biennale in 2003. She lives and works in Warsaw.

Marzena Nowak frequently reaches for memories, ordinary objects recalled from childhood. As she explained in an interview, “They tend to leave a permanent trace in our memory. They shape and form our psyche and sense of aesthetics. We continue associating them with something pleasant or unpleasant for the rest of our lives.” In this small-scale series, she replicated sections of patterns recalled from her own and her grandmother’s bedclothes. In the process, the banal structure of a pattern repeated against a white backdrop becomes a symbol of everyday reality. Bedclothes covering the sleeping human body may bring a second skin to mind.

Marzena Nowak frequently reaches for memories, ordinary objects recalled from childhood. As she explained in an interview, “They tend to leave a permanent trace in our memory. They shape and form our psyche and sense of aesthetics. We continue associating them with something pleasant or unpleasant for the rest of our lives.” In this small-scale series, she replicated sections of patterns recalled from her own and her grandmother’s bedclothes. In the process, the banal structure of a pattern repeated against a white backdrop becomes a symbol of everyday reality. Bedclothes covering the sleeping human body may bring a second skin to mind.

Since graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Marzena Nowak has replicated dozens of DIY sewing patterns (skirts, blouses, trousers, overcoats) in her paintings. She paints frame-restricted entanglements of lines reflecting the multiple diagrams and co-ordinates used to describe bodily measurements. They seem as fragile and ephemeral as the memories she references. In this monumental work, the artist recalls sewing patterns her mother used, published in Burda, a German periodical once hugely popular in Poland.

Since graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Marzena Nowak has replicated dozens of DIY sewing patterns (skirts, blouses, trousers, overcoats) in her paintings. She paints frame-restricted entanglements of lines reflecting the multiple diagrams and co-ordinates used to describe bodily measurements. They seem as fragile and ephemeral as the memories she references. In this monumental work, the artist recalls sewing patterns her mother used, published in Burda, a German periodical once hugely popular in Poland.